New video!

Hey - I've been blogging to BUGS recently. Koo koo!

Sorry to everyone - I haven't been doing anything but working on this video recently. I think it turned out OK and I'd love for you all to check it out and leave your comments:

New PERCEIVAL video.

I have been unable to dig up my cell phone recently - every moment is spent doing Foley and fighting a battle with my computer. Although I have to admit, I did take a break last night and maked samosas. They were good, but the dough wasn't quite right. The mint-peach chutney worked out great though.

I am always amazed at the difference between how quickly a fantasy can be conceived and how much long and trying labor it is to achieve it. If it can be achieved at all. (Always thinking about fantasy...)

There is a Lou Reed song on "Velvet Underground" the album (I hope my readers are familiar - if not, get thee hence and download), a song that seems to be about... um... actually can't quite say. And the lyric goes:

"Between thought and expression lies a lifetime"

And that's TRUE. Of course, it's MORE TRUE because it's set to music. And truer still because you can dance to it. But that's what I'm trying to say - I don't know how it is for you, but my head is full of fantasies, most of which will never even be written down, let alone acted on. And only a tiny sliver of pie will become true. Is that my lifetime? Or, wait, is it the process including the unexpressed fantasies, or is the only thing that counts the thoughts that actually find expression? And what the hell do I mean by "counts?" Who's counting? (Mathmaticians certainly are.)

In cases like this, perhaps it is useful to look at the next line:

"Situations arise because of the weather"

Well, that didn't seem to help much. It sure was hot today though. Am I supposed to look deeper? Climate is predictable, but the details of weather aren't. Weather is chaotic. Thoughts, or we prefer saying fantasies, are the attempt of the mind to make sense of the world. Making sense means putting it in some sort of order. But there's always chaos. Without chaos each fantasy would become reality instantly. Wouldn't that be supernatural! Stupid to say stuff like that though. It always makes me angry when people say, "Without gravity, people would just float off into space." Wrong! Without gravity the Earth would explode like a balloon and the sun would be snuffed in a giant black supernova sneeze and, who knows, the universe would probably cease to exist. Nobody even knows what gravity is. What would the universe be without chaos? I can't even imagine. But when chaos stops me from getting my email, oh man, I don't care that the universe wouldn't exist without it. Just maybe I can keep those "situations" from arising long enough to get a few things done.

I know all of this is pretty swampy stuff. Pretty day to day. But I'm just trying to do "slow life" my way, trying to be stupid and foody. I like thoughts that spin around and around, but they make me dizzy and I want to say "stop, fantasies - you are alive now." But I'm not there yet. We'll see...

Anyway, the video. Take a look if you have time.

Hi/Bye

Can't sleep (magic spider)

The spider looks like an enormous tank.
I'm afraid of crushing her when I move things on my desk.
My computer is her happy hunting ground.
Bugs love my computer screen - they see it from the backyard at night.
Yes, it's a female spider (she's a working woman).
Her body must be very light.
She does "poses" with her fluffy yellow fangs.
Her symmetrical rows and columns of black eyes are quite intelligent looking.
She's only half an inch wide, but she's surprisingly tall.
Still, I think she qualifies as "eensy-weensy."
She's a "jumping spider" - no web.
Gnats and mosquitoes are terrified of her.
My mouse icon must look like a bug - she pounces on it.
You can't eat that, silly!
Wow! I can make you crawl around with my mouse.
You move with perfect grace and a kind of advanced contrapposto.
You don't so much jump as flick your body forward.
Don't crawl on me spider - I'm not your natural environment!
But I appreciate the company and respect.
(I promise not to fool you anymore.)

memories

I was thinking a lot about memory, because today is memorial day (soldiers chase me around my daydreams all the time, so I don't have to have a holiday for them - I'm already terrified). I think they should actually change the holiday to "aren't memories strange and intense? day." I think it could happen...

Well, I guess I was just thinking about memory because I went up to Bard College where I went to school for my brother's graduation and to drink and dance a lot. I love dancing the most and my brothers and their girlfriends do too. I have to say - I love my brothers so fucking much. And their girlfriends too. But the campus does somehow haunt me - the people who I used to know quite well, and the people who aren't around anymore get pushed up against me. I don't believe in ghosts, but I sure do believe in getting haunted. I was thinking how I've changed and how I've stayed the same, and I think the most powerfully disturbing haunting was by the ghost of my former self. By which I mean that brains are net-shaped patterns that change in detail and connection and pathway strength. The unused paths slowly fade out and become mostly dead, or at least as dead as background static is. When there is an overwhelming amount of input, these ghostly paths light up again, and my mind is possessed by a low-power, low-fidelity replica of myself as I was before. This replica is not of me at any time, but is a collage of my past selves, each part triggered by some strong sensation associated with a memory - the smell of local summer flowers, the quality of the shadows in a certain place, the evidence of my passing on the walls of buildings, a certain tree I loved and painted, an old aquaintance's verbal mannerisms. But especially the land and the paths through it trigger me, perhaps it is because the resemblance to the neural pathways creates some kind of amplification through feedback?

Anyway, this is not an altered state, but it is like being occupied by a different person. It's all about content. Because the contents of your mind at any one moment - that is one way of saying who you are.

And the feeling resembles the overwhelming feelings of deja-vu and petite panic attacks I used to get in Osaka in 2001-2. And those were partially triggered by the dream diary I was keeping intensely while working a swing shift twice a week. My bed was surrounded on three sides by my drawings, notes, and dream diaries taped to the wall, and it was pretty intense, especially since I was having trouble making friends. So I started having difficulty distinguishing between dreams and reality - not all the time, just when I was sleep-deprived or spacey or sometimes while meditating. In zen these distracting hallucinations are called makyo - 魔境 - which uses 魔 - the kanji with the most strokes that I can write which can mean "magic." Anyway, I was able to overcome these by making good choices (i.e. stopping the dream diary and taking the drawings down and not drinking genki-drinks and sudafed pills to stay awake) and with a little help from my friends.

But the thing is - these makyo resembled the strange feeling of being haunted or possessed by memories. And I always described them as intense deja-vu, which is a kind of false memory. So what does this have to do with remembering dreams by using a dream diary?

So, dear readers, have you ever writ your dreams down? Regularly? What was it like? Was it intense?

Memorial day

I had a strange dream about men with cybernetic hands made of yellow sand, pretzel rods, and rusted rebar. They were in a first-person shooter environment. I was. There were three bad guys - a tall hollow-faced one, a broad-shouldered troglodite, and a supernormal business-man. I tried to attack them on a bushy desert plain. But they weren't hurt, only annoyed and I ran away, but of course they found me. I thought that they were going to kill me and I was afraid that it was going to be painful, but I was resigned to it because running from them was so terrifying. But it turned out that they were actually bodhisattvas, that they were good and it was me who was the bad guy. And they said that the game was over, and it didn't hurt at all, the desert switched off and my character was in a blinky nintendo-game-colored flat background. And some of my fingers were taken away and replaced by pretzel-rods and rebar because I had injured the world and so had destroyed myself and my ability to do good. It didn't hurt but it was shameful. And I was reborn in a different branch of the multiverse, where men had created a much more ideal planet, a green planet, by borrowing against good by burying a network of huge radioactive heavy-water-filled tubes deep in the earth. Deuterium? Tritium? And I was not myself. I opened the one tube gate that met the San Francisco Bay. And for a split-second I could see twisted creatures in the sharp crystal water through a round window, the gravity-defying vertical surface of the heavy-water tube. Then it exploded outward into the ocean, and millions of see-through men ran away from it, running on top of the water, but the heavy water came in an exploding wave and swept around the tiny planet, around the cities on the shore, swallowing all the creatures I had seen in turn, and lastly the three bad guys. And the earth became a perfectly featurless nintendo-game-colored sphere floating in an empty sky. And that was all there was because I was the sphere.

Infinity Echo Chamber

It doesn't have any size. But theortically there is a wall at the far end for sound to bounce off of. But who cares? I'll be dead before infinity, that's for sure. But we don't have to go to infinity. How about just down to the market and back - that should be far enough to kill the sound. And what about the air-conditioners whirring and the planes coming in for a landing at Newark? That's the problem with math I think. And I don't know what math is, but I don't know what art is or I am and I talk about these things all the time, so I can't bother to ask your forgiveness. Somebody should take the mathmaticians and say to them, "Look - these equations are really gorgeous, like some kind of extradimentional chandelier, but you need to look at the world!" Like taking a bad dog to where it made a mess. I've been trying to measure sloppy pencil lines and divide them by threes and two using a metal ruler long enough to understand that intuition thrives on a diet of imprecision. Intuition and joriki - meditation-powered mindlessness power. With all variables accounted for that extreme unselfish self-confidence disappears as it's imprecision is seen as inexacitude. Wrongness. There can be no imagination. But rulers fail on dubious lines and crumpled paper and on fudges and cheats. That's the real world - tree's roots grow around rocks and sometimes through them. Because breaking the rules is the key to creative action. What math makes sense? Estimation. But this should be a year at school and involve cliffdiving and trying to kiss people for the first time to emphasize the difference between zero and one. It is an unexplored branch of mathmatics that really makes me sore. Because math, being a made-up way of looking at the world, should take into acount these ten fingers and tell me why five should round up to ten. Well, there are certainly occassions where 5 becomes 8 to match the beat, or where five sticks out like a sore thumb but 5.3333333333333 clicks into a perfect whole. And there are times where zero and one are interchangeable, and where nine is one and zero at the same time, the only difference being that one is mirrored. I am not being mystical, I am just giving examples of numering systems I have had to use to create the animations for Perceival. Because number theory is as much of a mind game as art theory. And how about identity? Did you know that at the subatomic level, when you have two particles, it is impossible to switch them. They are separate, but they don't have identities, so one could be the other it is impossible to tell and a waste of thought to care. So what about infinity? Where are the consequences? The physical pain, the having to stop for food, the breath? Physics really fixed itself up good when it discovered the Heisenberg uncertainty principal - that down at the tiniest levels precise measurement is impossible. That you can measure one attribute of a particle, but not the other. This is pointing at the real. And big surprize, the universe isn't drawn on graph paper. So now physics is coming apart at the seams, and there is a place in the equations for an observer to tie it all together, which does tend to complicate matters by pointing to the mess, and that seems right. So what I am waiting for is someone to find the magic bullet for math. Blow it up! I want to see what color it burns! Because the biggest mystery is not that some people can find the square root of huge numbers in their heads, but that people can add two single-digit numbers and get the WRONG ANSWER.

Composit... I mean, COMPOSING (er, compost?)

Today I dug some dirt and I composed a song.

Here's the mp3:

Cubic Zirconium.

The mp3 sounds dirty, doesn't it? Muddy and staticky. Too bad. I want Chester to fix it up for me.

I also need to speak to someone who understands notes. Are there too many notes at the end? I want there to be a lot, but not too many. After you explain notes to me, please explain what is major and minor keys. Major sounds happy. Minor sounds sad. It's fun to mix them up. I only really know one chord - C major. When you take away some white notes and play black notes into that C major chord that makes it sad. And then you find a pattern-shape to bring it back into a C major chord one emotion-state at a time. The path of sound-pattern-induced emotions you go through from happy to sad is the story of the fantasy in your heart language. It almost always sounds best on xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, or glockenspiel. Is there any other way?



I have been neglecting... everything... so I can make these videos. It's not "worth it" - it's just the way I do things. But I'm so thankful that my friends leave traces here and there - I want to follow all the paths and one day I will leave my room and go roaming. Just not today. Or tomorrow.

New Perceival Post

Hey there -

I didn't post for a few days - I was super busy finishing the next video for Perceival. I know it doesn't seem like a lot of work, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I got ultra-frustrated on Monday when a mysterious glitch stopped me cold, but I didn't blog out my frustrations or my voodoo theory of complicated technology. That's a first!

This video is a bit longer and structured around the song I posted here a few days ago. I think I am going to try to scale back the musical element in the next one. Also, this one required the most drawing, and it was really too much - these are supposed to be more like sketches. So hopefully the next one will be easier for me and therefore get released faster. I am well into the foley though - it's fun to record and edit and it really adds a lot.

Anyway, anyone still left standing, please go to the Perceival site and leave your comments. If you want to follow-up with your older comments, that's OK too.

nature kick

I went up to Purchase to watch Chester graduate with my family. Someone has a DVD set of "Planet Earth" - the BBC documentary series. Of course it is completely amazing. I remember that the EPN was on a nature-kick for a while, and anyway, I've got to say that this should be required viewing...

There are two main things I was thinking about while watching. The first, and much less universally significant, but interesting to me as an artist, is how this documentary is given dramatic structure that seems influenced by hollywood conventions. Each story in the series is turned into the conventional storytelling arc, with a clear problem that leads to a climax - sometimes this is just a dressing-up of a story that was really playing out in front of the cameras, but at other times it is artificially constructed - even if remaining true to the reality of the situation. This injection of entertainment value is accomplished through narration, the sheer wealth of raw footage available to the editors which allows them to use hollywood conventions such as the establishing shot and extreme close-ups to accentuate emotional reactions, and the anthropomorphization of the animals - although one of the profound lessons of this series is that much animal life is as complicated socially as our own so perhaps this is more of a reverse anthropomorphosis - an animalization of humanity? (This also lead me to think about how much of my exposure to animals has been to that of the cartoon variety, a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon - that we are attracted to "cute" animals - kudos to the show for actually discussing these issues in the last episodes). The most obvious method used to dramaticize the show is the sound - both through a sound track that ranges from symphonic cry-fests to creepadelic contemporary noise experiments - it never drops to the level of grand kitch, but it comes rather close. The foley - the addition of sound effects that mimic the real sounds - also has been given deep attention and is particularly effective. These add up to create an artificially-constructed plot that seems simultaneously more real and more fictional than less expensively produced nature shows (this effort by the BBC is said to be the most expensive of it's kind). This raises a larger question, one that I am always dealing with, which is that fantasy is a huge part of our everyday life. People can't observe things without incorporating them into the grand story of their life or constructing eleaborate fantasies about what is happening. Anthropomorphization is one aspect of this primal urge, but our self-conception is as well, a conclusion I've read over and over again from neuroscientists, and zen teachers and experienced directly myself while observing my own mind (and yes it's obvious I've not get gotten through). I discussed some of these ideas with Chester, who was particularly aware of what the producers were doing with sound, and I would not have noticed these things if it were not for him.

The other thing that was on my mind of course is the environmental destruction humans have caused. If anyone can watch this doucumentary and not feel this lesson at a profound level, then I don't understand how they think at all (not that I don't respect them and want to understand how they think, but just that I can't empathize with someone who thinks so differently than I do and a lot of explaining would be required). I'm a person who doesn't put my faith in any idea very easily, and I tend to dwell in the details of how to understand day to day life rather than point our grand truths about "why" questions that may be interpretated morally, but it is impossible for me not to interpret the ideas in this show as anything less than a grand injunction to not destroy the environment. In the episode "ice worlds" there is a story about a polar bear that is so overwhelmingly heartbreaking that I can't stop thinking about it. But my interpretation of the situation leads me a more profoundly upsetting idea - the polar bear is starving and desperately needs to find food or he'll die. For him, food is a baby walrus, but the baby walrus doesn't want to die either and the walruses fight back with all their power. What is nature but an endless cycle of struggling and death? What caused chemicals on this planet to line up to form these complicated things that have feelings and desires and that don't want to die? Where does that desire come from? Is there any alternative? What can be done about the neverending cycle of desire and suffering? And specifically, what about my role in it? Why do I feel so sad about it? What is that sadness? Am I morally responsible? What does it mean to be morally responsible? It seems as though action is required, right? What actions can I take? Or are actions insignificant - would it really make a difference if the polar bear situation had a different ending? If so, why didn't the film crew intervene? If this is not where the true significance lies, what about the fate of an entire species? Is this any different or is it just a change in magnetude? What about my fate? What about my life is any different from the polar bear's life? Is it possible to stop the cycle just inside myself? Or is the urge to stop it just a part of its continuation? Is focusing on myself approaching the solution to the problem, or is it misled - just part of the continuation of environmental destruction through apathy? Is the true solution external? Taking action? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think they are important. I'm pretty sure that these questions were not raised directly in the show, but they were highlighted in my mind by the show and so I must say that this show is truly meaningful and may be one of the great art pieces of our time.

I am having a lot of trouble sleeping lately - I can bearly type - so forgive me if this post is a little wild. But with these impossible questions sometimes it is difficult to think clearly. The mind can seems pretty wimpy and get all scattered and full of holes. I think this is somewhat similar to thinking about the solution of a koan - any impossible questions will do, but koans are impossible questions that at first glance appear insignificant and uninteresting, whereas the questions "Planet Earth" led me to ask myself are obviously relevant and would seem to have some kind of practical or logical solution that requires action. But perhaps this is wrong. A koan can lead to enlightenment, but maybe the kind of impossible question that's been on my mind leads to something else...

New Song for Perceival

This song is called "stopping by the woods on a snowy evening." You can use it for your book report kiddies!

Only the following lines are relevant. You have to chose your battles!

He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake,
The only other sound's the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

BY ROBERT FROST (A little bird told me to credit this - thnx)

Yes, only one of the last two lines is relevant. But which one?

Can you hear what I mean? Of course, there are problems with the way it sounds, the balance, peaking and all. But I'm not a music-man like Chet or Dan. That said, I like arpeggios. A lot. And anything that resembles a xylophone.

I woke up, started working on this song, and now it is 11:39. Whoops! I am planning to use it for the next animation, which I am quite excited about indeed! Not all of the animations are going to be set to music (blat isn't), but it is gratifying to put these song somewhere. I've dozens of songs from my psr 550 days. Some more of which can be found here.



download mp3

Whew! I'm in an exhaustion trance. I have bits of thoughts flying around.
Music sounds amazing with headphones - computer whirring noises drive me bonkers. Or rather - there certainly are some amazing musicians out there. I wonder if the human mind is equipped to handle recorded music? It is so intense. Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm shrinking down. I could get into the Butthouse then. (I'll explain that sometime - flowers of disgust reference) I sometimes think music can be terribly dangerous. Some of these modern singers especially. What I want to know - has there ever been a study done to see whether you can "catch" depression or other mental illnesses? Because they are just a configuration, a systems-map of mind function. I know I can "catch" people's gestures and this helps me understand who they are... But sometimes I feel music creating these terrible small loops in my mind - I guess that's what holes are, anyway...
What is the difference between singing and playing music? Is that easy? There's a vibration that makes singing honest. Even if you aren't honest, people will see how you are not honest. And it regulates your breathing. That's why you might get really small and go into a hole.
I hope kensho isn't just religious ecstacy. I've never heard anyone compare the two. The descriptions I was reading in "The three pillars of Zen" are the most exciting I've ever heard. But I think they are dramaticized. Or selected by the Western mind of the writer. I thought zen was supposed to be boring and elitist. Why do I want it to be? I just don't want it to have anything to do with speaking in tongues or being high or makyo when I get really confused about what's a dream and what's real and I get panic attacks and deja-vu at the same time and can shoot lazers out of my eyes or anything like that. I understand there are different mental configurations, different states of consciousness. I don't want kensho to be one of these. I want it to be more different than these things.
Now I'm actually asleep.

New video

I finished the new video and I re-designed the blog as well.

Perceival blog.

It's been an exhausting day.

Dumn

Blogger is annoying for formatting.
YouTube is annoying for not allowing links.
FinalCut is annoying for thinking there is no memory available when there is.
People are the most annoying thing.
Robots are pretty annoying too, but not as much as people.

Improvements

Now featuring non-microscopic text!

The great debate among the various factions of synesthetic superscam is whether the black background sucks or not. I think it is awesome. It's like really tough. Like "The Crow."

I am asking this because I am busy re-making the blog for Perceival. So I'm thinking about blog even more than ususal. Which is not much, cause I don't think a lot.

Anyway - what changes should I make here?

New Blog

I just launched a new blog for the video project "Perceival" I've been working on. It's a big deal, but I'm making a small deal out of it on this blog 'cause I want to keep that blog a thing apart.

Anyway, check it out:

www.perceival.blogspot.com

Singing

I was listening to that song "A Pair of Brown Eyes" by the Pogues. I was thinking a lot about war since I played paintball last week - how nobody is making art or music about it, or how I'm not... And well, this song makes me think a lot of things... Plus, what the fuck do I know about war? But isn't there anyone who knows something about war who is willing to talk about it?

I found a great analysis on this mp3 blog I love called "moistworks," but it's buried in this huge page, so I copied the analysis into the comments here....

It's an amazing song because it moves between the realities of the guy sitting in the pub, and the fantasies he latches onto inspired by the music he's listening to. Pretty amazing - somehow psychedelic because it's dealing with the altered state - drunkeness - and how your mind works differently. Lots of swaying. Kind of like free-association, but not with thoughts, with emotions, where the reality of the song's emotional content is more real than where the singer is... But of course it's not like it's artsy postmodern tripe - it's a great song to sing without instrumentation, by yourself, to your dog, when your car's most important part is busted....

Anyway, the singer makes references to all these differrent songs, and that other blog seems to have figured out that it talks about, but at one point the lyrics go:

"An old man in the corner sang
where the waterlilies grow..."

But that's supposed to be a song title. I couldn't find the mp3 of the song, though I could hear 20 sec.s on iTunes - WTF? Isn't there any place where people can find old tunes or folk music for free? It's folk music! It's the original copyleft!

But I did find the sheet music. I am proud when I can find info that isn't elsewhere...

I'd like to learn how to sing this song - can anyone help me? Because I want to be an old man. And because, well, I've downloaded about a million songs, and they don't make me happy. I want to learn to sing songs that don't require instruments so I can sing anytime, so I can have the information in mh head and nobody can accuse me of stealing it. I hate how modern music alway requires instrumentation. The voice is of course the most amazing instrument - almost everyone has it and it's free and loud and easy to use and I think it is also the healthiest, and all these mp3s are making me sick in the head.

By the way, booze isn't always so cool, kids - check out this interview with Shane MacGowan...

But that whole album is amazing. That last song (which in a similar fashion is structured around that song "Waltzing Matilda") addresses what is going on in my country more profoundly than anything I've heard anyone say. But I'm not going to put it up here, because eventually I'm going to get busted for posting music, so I guess I'll just urge you to find it yourselves...

Starry Nite 2007

Click on image to enlarge!

This image is from the end of that last video. I fooled around with it a bit in photoshop. I call it "MOLD STARS" because it was made by taking still images of mold growing on my bathroom ceiling. I like how it is random-looking but follows a kind of hidden organic pattern. Fractalesque. Anyway, to get this pixel effect it's best to trick photoshop by changing the image size and resampling using "nearest neighbor" rather than using the pixellate filter, which produces a more boring effect. The strange thing is that stars in a galaxy also follow a fractal pattern. (It's worth enlarging because otherwise you can't see it - but if yu want to complain about compression, I can do that all day.)

You can also see this image in the following video, which was an early precursor to the "Perceival" project. Isn't the song creepy?

The thing is - I'm not an idiot. I know that most of you care not a shit about using photoshop or what I did today or anything. If we met in real life I would understand when you were bored. I would know when to shut up. I just thought you should know that. Plus I don't really care about anything, least of all whether my blog thrills you or not. The blog writes itself. I am trying to deal with things the best way I know how.

P- Final Draft

Removed.

P-

I just finished this video.

!!! I TOOK THIS VIDEO DOWN BECAUSE IT WAS A DRAFT !!!


I have nothing to say about it 'cause I'm exhausted. This is not really finished (there are a few "tweaks" yet needed), so I'm not trying to get comments or anything quite yet. I've also set up a blog for the video, etc.

Tell me what you think of it NOW because it's going to be TOO LATE once I release it.

Emotions (Booze?)

What I did -
Woke up
Read "Word Freak"
Took shower
Turned NPR off
Ate three english muffin halves (one I found in toaster) OJ, coffee with cardamom and milk
Read NY Times, esp. Science Times
Wrote blog - can't remember what - maybe just comments?
Drew pictures and made video
Checked Email and Blog
Worked on new blog for project
Went outside in the sun with Skillet for a jiff - sang "Oh Skilley Skilley You're a Wild Dog" by Yusef Islam
Read nonsense on-line
Ate a huge plate of leftover pasta and drank water
Started dishwasher
Tried to edit more video
Got frustrated about mysterious audio glitches in FinalCut
Read some of "Word Freak"
Watched video as is
Drank a rum and coke (and triple sec)
Watched video again
Checked Email and Blog
Wrote the content for title screen and started drawing the font
Sobered up
Went to my mother's "opening" - her student's art
Drove home early
Had a Whiskey something
Watched video a couple times
Checked Blog and Email
Made avocado sauce for chicken sando with my new fav. spice - McCormick's Chipolte Chile
Sobered up
Had a Martini
Had a Gin Tonic made with second half of Martini
Ate Chicken with parents, talked about school, terrorists in NJ, bees, plants (the usual)
Emptied dishwasher
Washed dished (Pops is a big mess) while counting to 211 in bad Chinese
Counted to 100 in bad Japanese
Went in to TV room, turned around
Watched video
Wrote down ideas about sculpture
Checked Blog and Email
Looked at crap on-line
Drew more font crap - got frustrated
Sobered up
Finished "Word Freak" - now I have no A-list reading material
Drew more font - stopped quickly
Checked Email, checked Blog
Watched video
Looked at Elliot Smith videos on YouTube for an hour
Broke some pencils with bad erasers and threw them into the trash can on the other side of the room
Wrote this
?

Is this an acceptable day? Was it productive?

A lot of the ideas I have about art come from music. But I'm kidding myself if I think that I can express my inner emotional state in the way that singer-songwriters like Elliot Smith can. Music can be a misleading allegory for art. Not that I always gravitate towards music like this. But I do think of the emotional honesty and realism as some sort of ideal (that there are different ideals is irrelevant when close to an ideal - they are like star's gravity). Waht am I talking about? This is just pop music, isn't it? Anyway, this method of communication can never be an ideal for my art - my art is becoming more and more cerebral, less expressive. It is changing me too. I've been flirting with the mechanical for a while. Is this a self-fullfilling prophesy? Maybe I am losing my soul - if I really thought I had one. But don't be misled - I can still dance. I can probably outdance 9 out of 10 Americans. But that's like saying I can outskinny Americans. What did Elliot Smith say? That killing your own feelings is the most popular way to fail? Or something. But I don't want to espress my feelings through my art. I don't know if I have feelings. At least not smudgy feelings - I think all thoughts are feelings. But to cease to differentiate between thoughts and feelings would be to lose a useful handle to understanding my own mind. But at this point my feelings are pretty homogenous and unmotivated. But that's dumb - how can I say I'm unmotivated? I get shit done. Look at my marvelous average day. But I'm not into it that much right now. But it is at least something to show. But it is all black and white. It's too serious. It's not smutty enough. I'm failing to be human. I guess that's a no-no for Bene Gesserit. But whatever - they thought that human meant only what isn't like an animal. Is the part of humanity that isn't like an animal like a computer? Is this a silly question or what?

I am getting blinky here.

Paths not taken

I've never seen "F for Fake," but I can't imagine it is better than this preview:



It is too bad our culture as a whole has not followed up on these kinds of things. I see them as being related to magick culture - divination is indistinguishable from everyday sensory data: the destruction of the world's time code to create a focal point for subtle observation of the irrational by a rational mind. That is like life in general - this video reminds me of this morning. But especially, and the most fun I had in a long time, when Dan was DJing while I fell asleep, and I woke up dreaming over and over to the world's most obscure tracks, Dan grinning like a creepy mask. That was several lifetimes of strange, as I was born and died in a few fantastic groggy seconds - it was I who was cut-up, not the tape.

FABBING and the future

Fabbing, a.k.a. 3D printing, a.k.a. "rapid prototyping" is a tolerably well-known technology. The printer prints one layer of plastic at a time to create any shape you can design. It could be used to make simple things like glasses frames, toys, utensils, replacement parts for appliances, etc. I am really excited about using a rapid prototyper to make small sculptures. Yay!

Thanks to Logan for sending me this article.

It explains that in a number of years affordable fabbers will be available to average consumers. Yay! We can dissipate more electricity, use up more petroleum, create more non-biodegradable junk to fill up the world! That is, if the country isn't conquored by cyborgs, wiped out by global warming, disease, beelessness, etc...



The most exciting thing about fabbing is not mentioned in the article (of course, neither is the fact that these things will only be afforable to the very rich for a long while). That is the copyright issue. The article mentions a few practical applications, and one that seems rather silly because it relates to entertainment - the example given is to go to the Mattel website, download the content that instructs the fabber how to manufacture a Barbie doll, use a program to graft an image of some familiar person's face onto the Barbie, and print it out. That is all well and good, but it seems silly to pay for Barbie's design when I am making her myself. The design is just information, and information should be free. Practically, it should be super-easy to go onto a file transfer site, perhaps illegal, and download this information so as to avoid paying Mattel. And I can alter Barbie's anatomy... Along with mp3s, books, movies, and images, many small plastic objects will be pirateable. Horray for the end of copyright!

Fabbing also raises the issue of mass-production. I have been thinking a lot about how the mass-produced media (think NY TImes, evening news, NPR, etc.) results in shared experience, commonality, a sense of a cohesive culture. Despite the violent, cohersive aspects of mass media there are some positives - shared knowlege makes in-depth conversations possible, enabling national debate about timely issues. The internet does not function like this - it is decentralized - many media sources for many different individual interests. Products like toys, tools, and clothes are artefacts that convey information - perhaps they are more subtle than mass media, but they also can be a forum for commonality, or cohersion for that matter (Barbie being a good example). What happens when people pursue their own interests and do not develop a sense of commonality from mass media and products? For that matter, will people ever want to give up mass-produced objects? Isn't part of commodity fetishism the fact that products are all alike, look untouched by human hands, and are generally replaceable? Isn't that where the aura comes from?

Before mechanical mass-production people could churn out several of the same product, but it would invariably have some element of human touch, some individuality and therefore was an expressionistic object, a product of unalienable labor, and that is why we value such simple objects today as folk art. Most of the time people did not produce many of the same thing, but produced items only when they were needed for personal use. This required that people have diverse skills, and without written instructions and long-distance communications, the same basic problems were approached in many different ways, producing solutions that had great variety in functional form. There was great commonality in how each culture, separated in physical space, created similar objects.



My question is - what will post-industrial culture really look like? How will it function? If everyone has a fabbing machine they will be able to create their own individual designs, modify ones they find, or at least choose the one they like best. Perhaps there will be much more variety. But I doubt that people will learn how to use their hands, or create novel solutions to age-old problems when functional, satisfying products can be downloaded in a jiffy. What will happen to commodity fetishism - the product will be machine-produced, but not mass-produced. Seems like a new paradigm for sure! Will a loss of commonality mean a fractured culture? Will people be less interested in the fate of their fellow humans, their suffering, their needs, their opinins, their masterpieces? Will copyright every really die? And if so, how will artists, craftsmen, designers, writers, musicians, etc make money to live?

I think one of the answers that seems unmentionable has something to do with the potential ability of society at this point in history to provide enough food and products to meet everyone's basic needs. This is called post-scarcity and is rather an elephant in the room. The reason this kind of talk is taboo is because it doesn't make any sense within the context of the capitalistic system into which we have been cowed by communist-authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and contemporary crypto-fascism. The end of copyright logically comes at the same point in history as post-scarcity, but we are behind quite a bit here, so the innovations are coming out-of-phase. Perhaps our species is not capable of cooperating to end scarcity, but much of our new technology for sharing information is going to be rather out-of-context in our capitalistic world of false-scarcity, and this will naturally create conflict. We are going to have to address this in tandem with addressing copyright.

Steal from the rich! Give to the poor!

North Jersey

I love looking out the NJ Transit NE Corridor train at all the decaying factories, rainbowed puddles, polluted marshlands, grafittied walls, busted-through fences, colonies of tractor trailers, seedy bars, hollowed ghetto architecture, miles of concrete and asphalt, overgrown lots, struggling amputee-trees, piles of industrial waste, and endemic litter in North Jersey - today was sharp and sunny, but grey and rainy is good too. Landscapes don't get any more revealing than this. It can be wabi sabi, it can be expressionism, it can be social realism, it can be dada. You can learn more the state of the county than from any book or anything... It is rather like a TV show because the window is just like a TV screen - I never visit any of these places, just look at them passively, disconnected, almost flat. But I don't want to say what I think it all means - I just want other people to experience it. I usually try to sit on the right side going south, looking west*. Which side do you prefer? Have you seen it? What does it mean to you?

*see comments section for a devastating re-evaluation!

Information War

Here is an influential and interesting article published in a military journal in 1997- a clear statement about the goals of the army in the information war of the 21st century. Please note how many of the ideas here have begun to be implemented.

CONSTANT CONFLICT

dead bee

dead bee



As you may know, the bees are dying off. Nobody knows why. Read about it:
bees dying by the millions
.why are bees dying?
why are all the bees dying
the bees are dying and they act like it's a mystery

Now, as I've said before - if there was a mass die-off of humans that wouldn't be a terrible thing in the long run, but if all the bees died then the situation would be much worse. What annoys me most about most of the reporting done on this subject is the assessment of the magnitude of the problem in terms of the dollar value of the the crops involved. This is the wrong way to approach the solution to a potential environmental catastrophe. The value of a certain wild species can only be evaluated in terms of its relationship to other species, its role in the ecosystem, and its intrinsic worth as a product of evolution. Any species can be exploited by humans and given a price tag in terms of its use value within the capitalist system. Science has long regarded the ecosystem as a perfect system of supply and demand - a complete free market system where anything goes. This is a valid way of looking at it, but we must remember that it is not adjusted to benefit humans. In recent years, some scientists have been presenting the arguement that the environment is self-regulating and promotes stability. This is often misinterpreted religiously as the Gaia hypothesis (which is an interesting idea, full of the kind of colorful and profound mumbo-jumbo that turns me on). This theory proposes that although humans are destablizing the environment, the destablized elements themselves will negate the source of the destabilization and the environment will find a new equilibrium. This means that destabilizers such as biological, chemical, and radioactive pollution, global warming, mass extinction, the propagation of non-native species etc etc will combine to create specific conditions that disfavor the survival of humanity. Once humanity is eliminated or forced to adapt the destabilization will be nullified. Allegorically similar to the functioning of the immune system. Of course, many other species will be destroyed, but in a few tens of millions of years the environment will reach a new period of stability.
I beleive this theory and don't see this process as being negative. I don't think it means that we all have to die, but it might. The alternative is to adapt. Adaption by evolutionary means requires a lot of death (what do you think natural selection means?)- which it looks like may be a big part of the 21st century. But for mutation and natural selection to result in adaptation requires a lot of time - thousands of years is pretty much top speed. We don't have thousands of years, we have tens, maybe less. Plus, because of the memetic environment (which operates on the timescale of days and hours) there is a second selector that creates its own competitive environment, nullifying the first. This is why natural evolution no longer functions to create adaptive humans.

If it is not too late to stop complete environmental catastrophe we have two choices -
do nothing, wait until it is too late and die out (the stupidest choice),
or remake society so that we are no longer destabilizing the environment (the most challenging choice).
If it is too late we have two choices -
do nothing and die out (the most likely possibility)
or use technology to adapt to a world without a functioning natural environment - i.e. the explotation of domesticated species and a complete move into a mechanical environment, total immersion in the plane of the second replicator, eventually leaving our biological bodies behind (the second hardest choice).

BTW
More prescient stuff - the owner can claim it if they wish...

bees are dying my room
sometimes
I trap them under a glass
and bring them to the balcony
mostly I find their corpses
beneath a layer of dust
by the window

O, I am

the unliberated
masses will all die
by me
my drunken friend
will never find
any one of my three
jars of honey

more tunes

Here are two more tunes from the recent bollywood slash hindi pop kick.

Yaara Sili Sili

Pyar Hua Chupke Se

BTW - I can see how many of you are downloading what song, and it is interesting. A lot more people download the songs than visit my blog. But you know what they say - stealing from thieves is the same as helping little old ladies cross the street.

Here is a page where you can download some of this music:

music

next animation

Here is the sketch for the next animation (the first of course being found here). This is just the guideline we used to move objects through this space. What does that mean? This animation took a lot longer because it was more complicated and I got confused. Not the first time.



I am only partially satisfied with this animation because the details are a bit too small and they tend to blur out. I woke up thismorning with this idea - what if I de-interlace the video when I export it rather than before applying the effects - wouldn't that make it crisper? I know that's not a topic of general interest, but whose life is interesting, generally?

I'm finding thee advice I'm hearing on the EPN to be pretty helpful, or at least supportive. The EPN rules.

Anyway - did you all know that I live in a cave with animal bones and pottery shards all scattered around? It's awful. I should push them out the door and down the cliff. But I'm busy staring into the heart of the fire. It's hot and bright and flickers and I can see ghosties winding through the embers. Zzzzzzzt.

No. I should really clean up this cave and clear the bats out the back.

Ug.

Ooog!

Why are we blogging??? (April review)

It's May 1.

I am getting really addicted to blogging recently. The main reason is that I have been working on this project for a show in September and the blog is a good way to rest my eyes (note that in the 21st c. sense, "rest" means straining them up to the point of damaging them whereas drawing is past that point). But I want to figure out why I am doing this. As L- pointed out, I am talking to myself a lot of the time. That's not entirely true - there have been some very caring and interesting comments here, especially when I take the time to write a post with a more clearly developed and interesting idea behind it and interesting visual content. But since it's clear that I am my biggest audience it would be reasonable to conclude that I am doing this for myself. That is actually OK with me. Sometimes talking to yourself is a great way of clarifying what you think. That's why people keep diaries, right? I certainly don't think it's so you can remember what you did... The thing about a blog is that it is PUBLIC. Putting private thoughts into the public sphere - how strange it is and what an ancient theme! L- and FameIsMagic are quite smart about this! I am trying to make my artistic practice work, and this blog may be training for me to develop ideas that relate more directly and honestly to the thoughts I am having in my everyday life, to enable me to communicate more openly, to identify the things that are meaningful and worth sharing with other people, and to develop a productive practice. But the blog also serves affects my life directly - the age old example being that if you somehow are observing, recording, and sharing your life, whether it be through writing, painting, 24-hour live video feed or whatever, that all bad things that happen to you become good things because you have something to share. Not that I share much of what happens in my life here... But I still ascribe to the philosophy that my life is boring and nobody wants to read about it. I'm not ready to give that up yet.

In the months after I moved to Osaka in 2001, after being right near the WTC thing, I would often have these horrible psychotic episodes or panic attacks or something where I would sweat a lot or freak out or get sucked up into my mind or something. It usually occured after becoming unduly fascinated with a sensation of deja-vu, or trying to remember a dream, or writing a song (I plan to do a post on some of these soon). I was working a swing-shift and sleep deprivation had something to do with it, as well as a combination of mild PTSD and being in a new culture without familiar social structures, i.e. friends to talk to about these strange episodes. Anyway, these things kept happening at work and led me to distrust myself, to be afraid of opening doors in my mind or to pursue my own thoughts too deeply. The only arena where I could think safely was in my art. This is why I was so pleased when I decided to drive all words from a practice of drawing that had been, throughout an intense senior year at Bard, very much an open diary with very specific verbal references to real life events, however deeply veiled and obfuscated. Why were they not straitfwd communications about my life? Because I was not trying to understand my everyday life - I was trying to understand the fundamental aspects of myself, of my mind, that had little to do with what was happening everyday, that had little to do with what exact people I met and books I read. A direct reference destroyed these things by pointing to the surface of the outside world. But in the drawings I made in Osaka I discoved that by eliminating the verbal entirely I could explore methods of communicating that disarmed the verbal thoughts that were alternately so boring and dangerous, and use the energy released by this fission to find a way of thinking that is not verbal. These drawings started to become very powerful to me - their power was in catching my eye and holding it without throwing words at it, and this helped me recover from my major malfunction. So too have many recent projects including this blog taken the events of everyday life and disembodied them, leaving only their fundamental energy trace. But I have been working my way up from the foundation of drawing that I developed in Osaka, becoming more and more verbal and more and more dealing with the specific and identifiable events that make up everyday life. The drawings are who I am, but they, like me, hardly have a place in the world at all. But as I learn how to verbalize these ideas, I suddenly find myself alive again, able to touch physical things rather than watch my hand pass through. Soon I am able to set them up the way I please, and to walk around in public. It is a true wonder.

So that would be one way to understand what I am tring to do.

Anyway. Next month I would like to include a bit more of my everyday life items - oh and I'd like to write a bit more about the books I read because I read a lot and forget what I read right away. Perhaps this will help me understand myself better, and it's not like I am wasting too much collective time because, as has been pointed out to me, nobody reads this. This said in the best of all possible humor. You can't see my face as I write but it is usually like this :) if it is not like this (xoX).

Anyway, now it's time for the monthly review - to look at what I were doing to see if it worked. This is a surface analysis:

The month opens with pictocracy beta, a post about the project that has now been mutated to fill the void left by the slow death of Glypix. I was excited to post this and see the results on YouTube and I am excited about the possibilities, but I will never be satisfied with the interest these things get until they reach a kind of critical mass the way the Colbert video did.
Passed over was not actually about passover. Fairly confused, but I am going after this kind of specificity that sometimes implodes. Now seems evident that I should have written about passover.
Penguin Club is still an amazing and completely unknown music. Only one person downloaded this - you should too!
The workers are human too was about how to compress YouTube videos, but quickly became more of a private rant about, what, holding your beath? I don't know - it seemed important at the time. But the specificity seems a bit more structured.
Searching for sentences on google is a brilliant post - learning that other people have had the exact same sentiments as I did, and creating a kind of narrative created by purely mechanical means (with cheating) - that is what this blog is all about. Or it was that day. But what is a diary if not a deconstruction and fictional telling of your life? I will have to repeat this experiment. These kinds of entries aren't very popular - is that because they are poor? Uninteresting? Are the people not given an "in"? Or are the people all boors? Ha ha. It's funny to talk about "the people" when you are actually talking mostly about your good friends, a few random strangers, and some sock puppets.
New Pictocracy - a bit of the wind going out of the sails of an idea that had seemed so promising. This one was perhaps not as good overall, but the idea of feedback, even if it is only comments on YouTube continues to fascinate - I wonder whether I should debut projects here or on the EPN.
Italian rice pie recipe for Easter - yum! Recipes are the best! You should make this!
Gotta go! - Sometimes an uninteresting post is better than no post at all. And sometimes not. I love ramen.
Music that makes sense to me - "turn my brain off" is an amazing song. Nobody was able to decipher the lyrics for me. Too bad!
Self Archeology was the run away hit of the month - literally thousands of fans had to be beat back with clubs and teargas. Was this post successful because of the images or because of the commentary? The truth us, interesting things - even manufactured ones - only happen to me rarely. Obviously the secret of writing is "having something to say." Imagine that!
The major update was that Dan Gibson has started a blog - unfortunately it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere yet. But he's a maniac, so it might. You should write about music, Dan!
If you have a blog and you eat ants for breakfast you simply must write about it right away. That seems evident.
Oh man. I was so hyper when I wrotelearning to fly. Did anyone try singing this song? I mean, if this seems crazy, well, that is who I am. I just wish I could focus more so writing is less of an excercise routine for my fingers and more of an act of communication. Oh well. It's improving slowly over time, like a dumb dog learning how to woof. No. Not like that. Dogs are born knowing how to woof.
Mehboob Mereis a great song, and this is a pretty successful translation.
Quantum mind is the kind of thing I've been reading about. I'd like to learn how to blog about what I read about - but how am I supposed to make in interesting? This will concern me more this month as I try to write about the books I read.
Another fine song is available for download onCat Bird. It is crazy how crazy things are...
Weather on the sun is more science-fictiony. It think I will be heading into the sci-fi world more regularly myself. Not the books. I mean, my life is ruled by pseudo-science and half-truths.
Good song - after Mehboob Mere I became more interested in Bollywood music - this song is much more beautiful. Go Go! Go!
I'mcardamom crazy. I take it in my coffee.
Interpretation check deals with my new animation project - stay tuned! I hope to be more concrete about my work this month.
At the beginning he says Oh Yeah - listen for it.